Classified advert breaks Tiananmen taboo

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It was a single line of a classified advertisement in a local newspaper. But to Communist Party officials it represented an outrageous act of defiance against a strict ban on references to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The advertisement at the bottom right-hand corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News on June 4 read simply: “Saluting the strong-willed mothers of June 4 victims.”

The date was written with the numbers 6 and 4 in Roman characters.

Few Chinese dare to mention the Tiananmen Square crackdown, in which hundreds of people were killed when the army moved into the heart